THE CONVERSATIONAL USE OF REACTIVE TOKENS IN ENGLISH, JAPANESE, AND MANDARINE

This paper investigates 'Reactive Tokens' in Mandarin Chinese, Japanes e, and English. Our definition of 'Reactive Token' (= 'RT') is 'a shor t utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener's ro le during the other interlocutor's speakership'. That is, Reactive Tok ens will normally not disrupt the primary speaker's speakership, and d o not in themselves claim the floor. Using corpora of conversational i nteractions from each of the three languages of our study, we distingu ish among several types of RTs, and show that the three languages diff er in terms of the types of RTs favored, the frequency with which RTs are used in conversation, and the way in which speakers distribute the ir RTs across conversational units.